The Televangelist

by Ibrahim Essa

  Despite what Hatem said, Kaaki was determined to have a program on the torments of the grave but without Hatem’s point of view. Hatem give in and obeyed. He still remembered that famous program, in which he didn’t say a single word about what he thought. He just went over the explanations and stories in the old books, with some phone interviews and a dramatic re-enactment that was followed by adverts for soap and shampoo, as if the soap was to wash the corpses.

  Hatem let Anwar jump around like a piece of popcorn in the popper, delighted he had successfully carried out the orders he had received from State Security. Hatem got down from his seat slowly, aware that none of the staff had come near him. They hadn’t whispered in his ear, congratulated him, or asked any questions. The smell of treachery hung in the air. Suddenly he found Nader Nour right in front of him in the studio.

  The film star was standing behind the camera surrounded by the cameramen, who welcomed him, shook hands with him, and gave him a warm reception. He came up to Hatem with a group of people and took his hand to lead him off.

  “Mawlana, Sheikh Hatem my dear,” he said. “Come with me. I’ve been looking for you for days, but you just ignore me.”

  Anwar was standing in a corner, busy with a phone call and smoking a cigarette.

  “Seven minutes of adverts left, Mawlana,” he shouted across the room.

  Nader pulled Hatem toward the door of the studio and took him by the hand down a short, narrow corridor, then turned into another, longer narrow corridor and opened the door into a room that was full of computer equipment and screens, but no people. It looked like it was out of use. Nader took him in and shut the door behind them. Nader sat down on a seat that he seemed to have occupied quite recently: there was a computer bag next to it, some cigarette butts, and his keyring. He asked Hatem to sit down on a chair facing a large screen. Hatem thought these detailed preparations were strange, but he went along with them out of curiosity because he wanted to know what Nader meant by being so suspiciously enthusiastic about meeting.

  “We’re friends, aren’t we, Sheikh Hatem?” Nader said.

  “No, we’re not friends,” Hatem replied forcefully.

  “You know, if you’d said anything else I’d have been angry with you. We’re not friends of course. You’re my sheikh and teacher and I’m your student.”

  “That’s not what I meant by my answer. And I don’t teach in the drama academy, so I can’t be your teacher.”

  “No, you’re teacher to Nader Nour the human being, not the actor.”

  “Five minutes to go!”

  “Till what?”

  “Till the end of the break. I’m doing a live program.”

  “Are you sure you want to go on with the program, Sheikh Hatem?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  Nader flicked his lighter and a jet of flame shot out with a hiss.

  “After the break that bastard Anwar’s going to ask you about Mukhtar el-Husseini,” he said, lighting his cigarette, “and any answer you give will harm you, and the answers you gave before the break have already done you enough harm. You’re pretty much finished as a television preacher.”

  “Is that a warning, a threat, or a piece of advice?”

  Nader sighed. “Okay, I want you to watch a two-minute video clip and then decide,” he said, with the confidence of a dog that knows an earthquake is about to strike.

  Without asking Hatem’s permission, he put a disk into the computer and the biggest screen in the room went blue, then pictures started to appear and move. It was a scene from a film that Hatem didn’t know, apparently a bad one, without any well-known faces. Then suddenly Nader appeared on the screen in what looked like a red bedroom, wearing an open shirt that showed his bare chest and smoking a cigarette.

  Nader froze the scene by pressing a key on the keyboard.

  “This is one of my silly movies,” he said. “It was a low-budget quickie, and in it I’m playing a young frivolous bachelor. I want you to watch the rest of the scene carefully and see who opens the bedroom door now.”

  He took his finger off the keyboard and the movie resumed on the screen. In the film Nader stood up and opened the door when someone knocked. The screen showed Nader’s face alone in the picture, smiling, and pretending to be overjoyed. “Welcome, signora,” he says. Then there was a shot from behind Nader’s back, showing the woman standing in a red dress with bare shoulders, coming in with a stupid laugh. He took her in his arms as he closed the door. For a while Hatem couldn’t work out what Nader’s various gestures meant, but he was stunned and his heart sank when the face of the woman in Nader’s arms started to become clearer. When she looked up, her face filled the frame. She was laughing shamelessly, like a woman of the night in any other Egyptian movie. Nader froze the frame from the keyboard and looked deep into Hatem’s eyes. Hatem was transfixed but couldn’t fully understand what he was seeing. His eyes glazed over, his head pounded, and his skin itched. It was Nashwa. She was an actress, and she had been acting all along.

  Hatem was shocked and humiliated. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Nader watching him with a mixture of sympathy and pleasure at his discomfiture, or maybe it was just the jolt of emotion Hatem felt when exposed as an older man that a young woman could toy with. Had he been the plaything of this girl, who now appeared in another shot on the screen when Nader fast-forwarded the movie? A famous young singer who liked to show off his bare chest appeared, holding the microphone stand as he sang. The words of his song were confident in their banality, and a young woman appeared, dancing in a group of other girls, though she was clearly the star, and the camera concentrated on her as she followed the singer. It was indeed Nashwa’s face and body, though she looked slimmer. Her short skirt was tight on her buttocks, deliberately designed to look sexy. Her blouse was open at the top of her cleavage and showed off the shape of her pert round breasts, which were supported from beneath to make them seem fuller. Hatem was offended by Nashwa’s shameless, exhibitionist strutting. She was like a slave girl advertising her charms in a slave market. It humiliated him as someone who had loved her and what remained of his love humiliated him as a sheikh. How could Nashwa be the same as this woman? A brazen whore, a vampish slave girl with a pretty face with dark red lips, black lines on her eyebrows, and green eyeshadow, long pointed eyelashes as bold as the looks she received were lascivious, and an inviting smile that served only to arouse. How could this pretty and flirtatious girl have changed into that fanatical, puritanical young woman who clung to the formalities of religion and had the illusion that her own piety was Islam? Which was the real Nashwa: the woman in the niqab or the woman who threw herself at him to kiss him passionately, unable to control her desires?

  She was never this way or that way. She was just a smooth operator that had been set on him. He had to understand that she was a trap and he had walked straight into it. What had she done to him now? Had she revealed his secret? Surely the only reason she had come to see him, or had been placed in his path, had been to make sure that he had a secret that she could reveal.

  Hatem sat down, exhausted and confused. He didn’t bother to demean himself by asking about her or about the details of what was behind this revelation that Nader had just sprung on him, but he was shaking inside and he felt as if thousands of ants were crawling inside him. Anwar Othman opened the door and Nader quickly froze the movie at a picture of the sheikh’s beloved dancer.

  “Mawlana, two minutes to the end of the break,” Anwar said.

  “We still need time. Please extend the break, Anwar, and I promise you I’ll do you a program in which I confess that I used to kill cats when I was young,” Nader said.

  Anwar looked at Hatem, who looked up at him and could see immediately, from the glint in his eyes, the raised eyebrow and the tilt of his head, that Anwar knew what Nader was showing him, but he didn’t say anything.

  Anwar went back out of the door, muttering, “We can extend the break. Whatever you say, you big shot
, but are you sure your confession about cats will interest the audience?”

  Nader shut the door behind him.

  “Definitely, especially when I go on to say I used to gather the cats together for orgies in my bedroom and take pornographic pictures of them,” he said.

  Then he rolled his chair over until it was almost touching Hatem’s.

  “Why am I here?” he said, looking toward Hatem. “You must be wondering, Mawlana. And why did I show you that film of Nashwa dancing? Why right now, in the middle of a program in which that police informer fraud Anwar Othman is going to ask you about Sheikh Mukhtar and the Shi’a and all that shit?”

  Hatem didn’t answer. He just swallowed Nader’s words.

  “They invited you to this program to get rid of you or finish you off if you decide to go on defending Mukhtar el-Husseini and the Shi’a,” Nader continued. “And please don’t tell me you’re not defending them but just stating the facts. These days if you don’t denounce them, then you’re with them. The whole country treats religion like the movies, Mawlana. It’s very clear and simple. There are good guys in the movies and there are bad guys, and of course we have to be the good guys if the movie’s going to be a success. Don’t speak to me about drama, or the dramatic context, or the logic of events, because that ruins the movie. If you go out now and tell us there are some bad things about the good guys and there are some good things about the bad guys, that will get you in deep trouble, as you know.”

  Nader stood up and took hold of Hatem’s chair.

  “It’s not just a matter of your work and having your programs banned,” he said. “I’ll bet no one would dare produce a program with you, or invite you on as a guest, or even shake your hand in the street. It’s gone way beyond that. What you say will pave the way for them to include you in the Mukhtar el-Husseini case. At first it was just a matter of playing around and framing the poor guy, but now it’s gotten bigger and they want to spite Iran and take a shot at Hezbollah, so they decided to make a big deal of the case. I know they promised you that the man would soon be able to go home, and I’m sure he will, but first they’ll drag him through the mud and destroy his reputation and the reputation of other prominent people such as you. You know why, Mawlana? Because they thought you were one of them and under their control. When they realized they couldn’t wind you up with a key, they were stunned and decided to punish you. But there’s still a last chance, in just a few minutes. You can go back on air and abandon the courageous stance that took them by surprise, abandon Mukhtar el-Husseini and go back to being the sheikh they knew before, the one they trained, I’m sorry to say. That’s the down payment on a truce between you and them. To make things worse Nashwa will reappear, God alone knows under what circumstances and what your involvement with her was, but anyway, you did get involved, though I don’t know to what extent. But definitely you know and they know, because they’re the ones who sent her.”

  Hatem finally spoke. “Why are you doing this to me?” he asked.

  His voice sounded as if it came from deep under the sea, from a man who was drowning or from a diver. Nader smiled, ignoring the fact that Hatem has said ‘you’ rather than ‘they.’

  “You’re the most famous sheikh in the country, Mawlana. And the most popular, the highest paid, the most influential, and the most widely viewed. They were the people who allowed all that. The mosques would close their doors to your lessons and the television stations would ban you from appearing, and the producers would stop making your CDs, if they wanted. If you want to be a sheikh, Mawlana, you have to be their sheikh.”

  *

  In the past, he had always said what the red light wanted him to say.

  When the light went on he set off, as if in a race that he always won. The learning was carefully measured, the dose precisely controlled. He had walked on safe paths and chosen areas that were interesting and important without disturbing people’s expectations. He was a merchant of religious knowledge, not a doctor who treated people and ordered them to take their medicine, even if it was bitter. He was a singer who sang what pleased his audience and what his listeners requested, not what he wanted them to hear. He received applause in the form of sighs of admiration and cries of ‘Allahu akbar’ in the mosque or from the studio audience, and in the form of the adverts that poured into his programs. His fees rose and there were pictures of him on billboards in the street and on the covers of magazines. He was the modern sheikh, but nothing of what he said was modern. It was just the same old ideas drawn from the same old books, following in the footsteps of the old sheikhs, without any innovation, without shocking the audience, without any original thinking. Yet they still saw him as ‘the modern sheikh,’ because he spoke in an easygoing style, simplified things for them, told amusing anecdotes, cut back on the traditional complicated talk, and gave plenty of examples. He made jokes that made people laugh, talked about things that happened in soccer matches, included the world of soap operas in his explanations of religious matters, slipped in technical terms, and set up a Facebook page and his own websites on the Internet. He brought together a group of young people to film his program and had young singers of the same generation sing the intro, but he was very conservative about never straying from the mainstream.

  There were two kinds of learning in his life. There was the learning he had studied and loved and treasured. Like a camel roaming free in the desert, he found himself in it, silently and in seclusion. He used it, warily and stingily, only to provoke rival sheikhs and show off to conformist preachers who always gave textbook answers. What he liked most about Hassan was that he brought him back to that kind of learning: debate, reasoned disputation, history, and reason. One of the things he liked most about being with Nashwa was that she challenged him to dig up that learning, rub off the rust, and give it a shine. The other kind of learning was the learning he dealt with on television and when he spoke in public—the learning associated with the red light. When the light went on, he spouted it out, earning hundreds of thousands of pounds, millions in fact. His contract as exclusive main guest three times a week on Anwar Othman’s program was worth a million and a half pounds a year, and the days he appeared were the days the station made the most in advertising.

  On that particular day, after Nader asked Anwar Othman to extend the break in Hatem’s program, they ended up running adverts for twenty minutes.

  “Hey guys,” shouted the producer from the studio door, “no one ever has commercial breaks this long. It’s very unprofessional and we’re the only ones who do it.”

  “Go to hell and let’s make some money,” Anwar replied.

  Nader followed Hatem back to the studio to go back on air. He watched as Hatem met Anwar at the door to the set. He was surprised to see the sheikh take Anwar by the arm and say, “I’d like a quick word with you in your room, Anwar.”

  Hatem had tiny beads of sweat all over his forehead and his body was bent with fatigue and dejection. His face looked tired and earnest. His roaming eyes were slightly bloodshot, with a trace of tears in the corners. When he and Anwar went in, Hatem noticeably clenched his jaw and ground his teeth.

  He had often been in Anwar’s room, which deliberately and foolishly tried to show visitors how stylish it was. It was small, like all the rooms in the studios, but it was the least cramped and it had an en suite bathroom, a bed with soft, expensive sheets, and a large mirror to satisfy Anwar’s vanity, with a gilt frame indicative of his old-fashioned taste. He also had famous and expensive brands of perfume, an extraordinary selection of ashtrays and lighters, a wardrobe that covered the wall, left open to reveal Anwar’s suits and shirts, a sample of what he owned and what he spent on clothes. In front of a picture of his boorish face, Anwar invited Sheikh Hatem to sit down on a black leather massage chair that filled half the room, with big armrests and a high, adjustable back. But Hatem maneuvered Anwar into turning a half-circle and Anwar ended up sitting on the leather chair. Hatem pushed him onto it and said, “Rela
x a minute. I have a surprise for you.”

  Anwar was surprised, but he raised his eyebrows in defiance of the sheikh because he knew he was in the stronger position.

  “I might have asked you,” Hatem said, “to tone down your questions and the way you ask them, and not to carry out the plan to destroy me as faithfully as you usually obey your orders, but I couldn’t be sure you would agree if I asked you to make sure the evening went off well. It’s also impossible for me to back out of continuing with the program because they would immediately see it as a sign that I was running away, as a sign of weakness and fear, and that would damage my image in the eyes of the audience and State Security.”

  “So let’s go and finish off the program,” Anwar replied gloatingly as he rose from his chair. “I’ll ask you questions and you can save yourself by answering as the situation dictates.”

  Hatem reached out and put his hand gently on Anwar’s chest as he stood up.

  “No, there’s another solution you haven’t considered,” he said. Hatem pushed him back violently, throwing him down on the massage chair, which was opened all the way and lying flat. Then Hatem stepped forward and put his knees on Anwar’s supine body. He managed to immobilize him by pressing his arms down on Anwar’s chest and shoulders. Anwar had no idea what was happening. All he could feel was Hatem’s clenched fist punching his nose and chin with a strength that amazed him. Then the pain began and he screamed. He caught a glimpse of Hatem’s fist, colored red with the blood pouring out of his nose and jaw. When the fist hit his eye like the head of a hammer, Anwar passed out.